Getting to Know Bridge, Camera Raw, and Photoshop

Adjusting images in Photoshop CS2

emember the days (just a few years ago!) when digital photography consisted of having fun shooting photos, transferring them to your computer, and enhancing them using Photoshop? The choices were simple: shoot in JPEG or TIFF format. JPEG format is pretty good, but TIFF was supposed to be better (even though the resulting image files were huge). Before long, we figured out that JPEG quality was pretty close to TIFF quality; for the most part, shooting images in TIFF really didn't offer much advantage.

Discerning digital photographers have always wanted a file format that works like a digital equivalent of a traditional negative — giving the photographer total control over processing the image data captured by a digital camera. (Sure, you could skip the tweaking and leave it all up to the camera's internal processing software — but why settle for blah results?) In the past few years, new digital camera models have delivered just that — the raw image format. The software that gives you control of those raw images is called (logically enough) Camera Raw.

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